English Vegetables, Desi Steak

Galangal and lemon grass were piledup in hillocks. The mushrooms were fresh and came in four varieties-white, dried dhingri, dried shitaake anddried, slightly dubious porcini. "Maydum," said my old faithful vegetable seller, "aur bhifresh-fresh aaye hain." I came back with the usual urban load of fancy ghaas-phoos: borkoli, snaw piss,red peepers, aspagragrass -- and with a phrase reverberating in my head. English vegetables.

As opposed to desi veggies. Myfather-in-law had used it first, in appreciation of a dish of babycorn and red peppers tossed with hing, jeeraand fried onions: "Aamar," he had said in Bangla, on the only visit he ever made to our house,before the cancer made travel difficult, "English vegetables khub bhalo laagey."

It was a winter evening and as Imechanically sorted, made mental menus and stashed my load of exotica away, I found myself counting theabsences. The day before Diwali is when Bengali households celebrate by lighting fourteen lamps and cooking amixture of fourteen kinds of saag. This year I'd made up the quota with the usual greens -- palak, methi, lalsaag; and some less usual ones -- bok choy, watercress. (My conscience cavilled that watercress was not saag. Irejoined that I didn't have all day to shop, and that watercress was peppery, green and leafy -- ergo, closeenough to saag not to make a difference.)

I slowed when I hauled out a bunch ofcarrots: orange, like the ones in the 'phoren' picture books for children, and tasteless, unlike the deep red,hairy, indigenous varieties that were increasingly hard to locate. Mulberries and phalsa had been equally hardto find in the summer gone by. In the fancy markets, English vegetables were easier to get than ever before;the old, desi roots-and-tubers stuff harder to come by, barring a few limited staples.

***

Ten years ago, at the Calcutta Club,I'd eavesdropped on a conversation happening two tables away. "These Phrench Phries," complained aman in a Bong-Yank accent, "they are bherry limp. Not like the ashol jinish, the real thing, atall." "It is the potatoes, Alok da," said his companion gravely. "Until India learns togrow potatoes like the Idaho variety, we cannot sample the authentic Phrench Phry." One chewed on arelatively inoffensive steak, whose authenticity had not been called into question, while the othercontemplated, with solemn displeasure, the unworthy impostor on the plate. Together they managed to convey theimpression that what to my untutored palate was a perfectly reasonable alu-bhaja would never make the passinggrade as even third-rank Phrench Phries.

That was before the Hindutva brigadediscovered that the two ingredients you need for the perfect Phrench Phry were: a) the humble potato raised tothe standard set by the Idaho variety and b) distinctly unsacred but tasty beef tallow as the frying fat. Orthe Phrying Phat. Either way, it was only a short while before, for McDonalds and company, the Phat was welland truly in the Phire.

***

That evening, as I chopped redpeppers, cucumber and tomatoes for a last summer gazpacho before winter set in and drove me to the comfort ofhot soups and plain dal-bhaat, the German laser knives someone had gifted me felt wrong in the hand, theirweight suddenly awkward. Setting them aside, I came up with a chopper set on a wooden board that a friend hadbrought down from New York. It made swift work of the Spanish onions and the peppers, and I remembered thepride with which he'd told me that this was the very "offset serrated blade" praised by AnthonyBourdain in Kitchen Confidential.

I'd reached the tomatoes and the lastof the twilight was shading into smog when the sleekly post-modern lines of my New York-imported offsetserrated blade blurred into another, more familiar image. Take away the jargon, and my chopping equipmentstood revealed as a boti -- the raised blade set on a rough piece of board that's ubiquitous in Bengal and mostof India. The boti retails at the equivalent of $2 or less; my offset serrated Bourdain-approved blade sellsfor $130 in some California stores.

The kitchen stood revealed as across-cultural minefield. The antique Italian peppermill, a gift handed down by my mother-in-law, used by hermother in the days when the possession of such an item conveyed an aura of world citizenship on the user, isemployed in our house to grind saunf and roasted jeera. The silver salad set and the silver toast rack wereceived as wedding presents are forlorn white elephants: there is no butler to polish them, I prefer woodensalad sets anyway, and we are a toast-averse household. Jars of dried Italian herbs sit side-by-side withvarious masalas, bought whole once a month, roasted at home and freshly ground. The dried Provence and otherherbs taste like...crumbly green flakes. Just as we inveigh against "curry powder", there being nosuch beast in the Indian culinary lexicon, I imagine a brigade of forlorn Italians raising their voices to theheavens in protest against the use of tasteless flakes instead of the fresh herbs from the garden the originalrecipes demand.

I know that this discomfort isinherited, a family legacy. As with bloodlines and songlines, if you follow the tangled skein of foodlines farback enough, you may discover truths about yourself. Uncomfortable truths; but truths, all the same.

***

In my mother's house and mygrandmother's house, meals came in two varieties: Indian and English. Indian was self-explanatory: in Didima'shouse, it featured the best of Bengali cuisine,with a detour down the cosmopolitan byways of a Brahmo household. In my mother's Delhi house, thedelicate spicing of classic Bengali cuisine collided with the in-your-face punch of North Indian cuisine. Itwas one of those marriages that worked, against all reason.

In both households, however, theEnglish meals followed the same pattern. Vegetables were boiled to within an inch of their lives, moreoccasionally lightly steamed with lemon butter; glorious jeera-spiked versions of white sauce alternatedominously with "bakes" distinguished by listless curls of Amul cheese. Cabbage was served up in thick,tasteless wedges that resembled steamed cotton wool, but sometimes it received the fusion blessing of coconutand mustard seeds with a dash of malt vinegar, all added Anglo-Indian style to the crisply shredded and onlybarely blanched vegetable. But the crowning sleight-of-hand came with the Roast: mutton roasted on coal fires,served with tasty but gluey "gravy". It was years before I realised that this wasn't even mutton dressedup as lamb: it was mutton dressed up as lamb pretending to be the forbidden meat, beef.

The sacred cow occupied a slightlyambiguous position in our household. It was perfectly all right to go out to five-star restaurants and order asteak, since it was understood that hotel steak was godless, procured from an atheist cow. This polite fictionwas maintained even in the face of the knowledge that most (atheist?) steak-providing cows in Delhi wereactually (agnostic?) buffaloes.

In Calcutta, conversely, beef wasacceptable except if you had especially religious-minded Hindu relativescoming over for dinner, and even then occasionally passed off in extremis as innocuous mutton. If the recordstates that we were responsible for corrupting good Hindu souls, so be it; but add that they thoroughlyenjoyed what they were eating, so long as they were allowed to do so in ignorance. The sturdy Brahmo steaksDidima cooked were seasoned with crushed pepper, fried onions, grapes, and of course, a delicious guilt.

But families change, and so did mine,eschewing red meat apparently for reasons to do with cholesterol. Once I organised an impromptu family lunch --several decades after our five-star steaks and our Calcutta beefsteaks. The potato salad and curriedmushrooms went down well, but the plate of steak -- cooked medium-rare, so that its pink juices oozed balefullyout -- lay accusingly on the table while everyone politely ate the takeaway tandoori chicken we'd ordered as abackup. It was a small thing, but it pointed at a rift, indicated that at least in matters of what we were orweren't willing to put into our bodies, my family and I had gone in different directions.

***

Between these two extremes, theIndian lunches and the English dinners, lay a third path, not moderate but iconoclastic. It was provided by myThakurma, who travelled from household to household along with her husband until she and Thakurda establisheda kind of metronomic movement between my father's house and his younger brother's house. There were two otherbrothers, but one lived in inaccessible Air Force cantonments, dots on the map of India. The other had marrieda practising Wiccan who convinced him that he was actually the bastard of a royal family, fostered out in myThakurma's household. Ignoring the evidence presented by the family nose, the very distinctive protuberancethat was replicated faithfully on the physiognomy of all the brothers, he elected in the interests of maritalpeace to disown his natural family.

Having Thakurma and Thakurda to staywas no penance: one was the source of magical stories, the other of practical wisdom. Besides, Thakurma'sculinary contributions were of the subversive kind. She cooked everything forbidden by the dentist and tookabsolutely no notice of family preferences, convinced -- correctly -- that her skill in the kitchen would overcomeall resistance.

We had an early skirmish over fish,which, in repudiation of my Bengali roots, I refused to eat. A galvanised iron tub of catfish was a permanentpresence in the kitchen; I named each whiskered creature and was told that the ones missing every night hadgone on a trip, and never connected the maacher jhol on my plate with the straying travellers. Aside fromcatfish, though, I flatly refused to eat anything else from river or sea.

Wiser than my mother, who was on thelosing end of a running feud with a ten-year-old's stubbornness, my Thakurma retreated from the battlefield.When my suspicions had been lulled, she greeted me with nimkis and an addictive mashed, pickled thing that Iinstantly loved. It was smooth; spiced to perfection with mustard oil; had a taste that brought the sea intomy mouth; I thought she'd wrought magic with the humble potato. When she confessed that I'd been eatingnon-catfish fish for eight days without protest, I flew into an absolute rage. It's only now that I canacknowledge her triumph: not only did she make me eat what I hated, she made me love it. In the war between myprejudices and my tastebuds, she won.

As the years went by, the twohouseholds were tossed around. My Kaka went abroad; we spent six years shifting from house to house in Delhiwhile my father was posted in Calcutta. In that period of collective rootlessness, my grandparents shared ourrefugee status. Sometimes with us, sometimes not, depending on the size of the house my resourceful mother,lumbered with three rambunctious children, could find.

All the places we stayed in then hada common feature: the pre-shrunk kitchen. Instead of the large, roomy spaces we'd grown up with, we had toaccommodate ourselves to closets with a stove bunged in. Thakurma's repertoire of sweets, which ranged frommalpoa to payesh, from sandesh to labango latika, from layered patishaptas with their filling of coconut andraisins to narkeler nadu, shrank in tandem.

Perhaps we noticed, perhaps wedidn't. My sister and I had discovered liqueur chocolates, one of the many dazzling items that we knew of onlyas articles brought back from the amorphous land called Abroad. My mother walked in to find her daughtersreplete with chocolate, but with no signs of a liqueur hangover. "There was smelly water inside," mysister explained. "We threw it away and ate the rest." The kitchen sink reeked of assorted liqueursfor days, until our cook poured quantities of yeast down the drain. The sink continued stinking, but now in afamiliar as opposed to exotic way.

I do remember, despite the lure ofbiscuits from Paris (they tasted disappointingly like Britannia biscuits) and then-exotic Toblerone, thatThakurma kept up the tradition in exile with a token offering. Sometimes it was alu-bhaja for tea, flauntingtheir swadeshi flavour in stubborn denial of conquering alien tastes—Thakurma never ate a McDonald’sFrench Fry in her life, and wouldn’t have felt that she’d missed out on much. More usually, she'd pull outa battered Dalda tin which contained moas -- the lightest of confections, puffed rice held together with meltedjaggery. When they returned to live with us, the tin smartened up, courtesy the birth of my brother, Daldagiving way to shiny blue Lactogen.

But the habit remained; though shemade patishaptas and channar-payesh once in a while, it was Thakurma's moas that flavoured those years of ourchildhood. They provided a rare thread of continuity in those years of evictions and constantly changingschoolbus routes, of exoduses where my mother lead the way like a new Moses, appealing to our sense ofadventure as we moved yet again, me lying in a malarial haze at the back of the lumbering black Ambassador, mybaby brother stolidly holding the TV aerial out of one car window like a conquering flag and my sister perchedon a pile of rugs and cushions in the front passenger seat.

***

"Would you like to see ourovens?" asked the chef of a snazzy new Italian restaurant, just opening in Delhi. "They'rewood-fired." I heard the pride in his voice and followed gladly into the inner reaches of the kitchen.Men and women in chef's whites, tocques clapped smartly on their heads, shaped loaves, prepared duck's breastsfor roasting, checked a brace of guinea hens. The ovens were huge, industrial sized. The doors weredeliberately unpainted, in a designer way meant to indicate rustic charm. They were large, and as they clangedopen, twin odours of meat, from one, and bread, from the other, were released in fragrant clouds.

A beaming assistant yanked freshlybaked foccaccia out of the oven and deftly assembled accompaniments of virgin olive oil, pesto and sundriedtomatoes. Another platter contained zucchini, cherry tomatoes and other English vegetables in araspberry-vinegar reduction. "For you," he said. "To taste." The bread smelled divine. AndI knew that if I so much as tried to take a bite, I would vomit.

Three years ago, I had accompanied myfather to the electric crematorium on Ring Road, braving the raised eyebrows of well-meaning North Indianfriends who felt that women had no place in that temple to death. But the woman we were about to cremate wasthe first feminist I'd ever met in my life; it was because of her that my mother had become a lawyer, wellinto middle age, instead of remaining a housewife. It was because I'd seen her writing short stories that Iwas trying to earn a living with hack journalism instead of marrying some rich guy and doing ikebanaarrangements around the house. The least I could do was show up to say goodbye.

The electric crematorium, with itsbare stage for relatives to say a few words, do a few last rites, reminded me of the many knocked-togetherarenas where exiled Bengalis would gather during the Pujas to put on bad, histrionic, nostalgic plays. Mygrandmother's body looked very light; those who raised her bier didn't have to strain.

She had died in the sterile,impersonal space of a hospital ward, instead of in her own bed at home. She and her husband had remainedeternal refugees, first from Bangladesh and then from Orissa; the small patch of land she had tried to buy andclaim as her own outside Delhi was mired in an interminable legal tangle. The only space they'd had was thespace they'd carved out inside our lives, and that was huge, unpartitioned, beyond all boundaries.

I joined the avalanche of mournerswho'd shown up for Thakurma's funeral, realising for the first time how many lives she'd touched. From myfather's colleagues, who had often sat down to chat with 'Mataji', to the vegetable seller, to my friends, toher own friends -- they were all here, in tacit tribute to a life fuller than we'd thought possible.

The furnace at the electriccrematorium is built like a Dutch oven. After the final rites have been performed, the eldest son stepsforward and breaks the skull of his parent with a stick. Some say this frees the spirit; a dourly realisticfriend told me briskly that this prevents the skull from exploding in the intense heat of the flames."One doesn't want," she said, "bits of one's brains going off any old where."

My Thakurma lay on the platform infront of the oven. There was a final muttered prayer, a clang, the platform slid first forward and then withsurprising speed, backward as the door to the furnace opened. She went in head first, her eyes closed, andbefore the door swung shut again I saw her head and then her torso haloed by flames.

On the plate held out by theassistant chef, I imagined I could smell wood ashes, burning flesh, crisped bones. His smile was beginning toslip a little; the staff was beginning to look a trifle questioning. In place of the focaccia, I thought Icould see my Thakurma's fair, wrinkled, only slightly mottled flesh, beginning to sear. The door of therestaurant’s brand-new, state-of-the-art wood-fired oven clanged again, as someone pulled out the duckbreast au jus.